Yes, just having one or two of each different flavor type that does great in one’s climate type, and ripen them the best you can. Yet that can be confusing if not many people are growing figs in the same kind of climate. If there were not over a hundred fig varieties going all around the country, then most of us would have no clue what to get. Some people have to try over a hundred varieties, for the rest of us to know what to get.
I would have tried way more than I have if we had way more land. That is one reason that I had so many different fig varieties be trialed in NYC, that way the fig trees could be spread out all over NYC. Sadly I could not get all the varieties that I would like to get in to NYC, yet they have way more varieties than they used to.
It’s funny, despite so little land existing in NYC per building, still over 100 fig trees that they received because of me where planted there.
Me, I never paid a lot of money like we see in some of the auctions, I wait until the prices go down, the most I have paid for a fig variety was $20 per cutting, and it’s very rare that I pay that much. Although if no one paid way more money than that there would have been way less discovery of what is out there. Which would have been a bad thing. I think that within a few decades there would no longer be any reason to experiment much any longer.
Each person has different preferences, I prefer things like pears (European and Asian), things like figs, things like a very sweet pineapple, and many so ons better than I like any apple. I myself never understood why anyone would start a apple tree collection.
That sounds like a great idea actually. I might do this for my area once my plants are established enough. I love sharing but hate driving hours just for these things so i might use this to bring people to me lol. I wonder if this would satisfy some agricultural funding grants if they’re done for free and as a class like structure.
yes they do! Theres a few fig festivals where people bring figs to snack. And then people will invite people over for tastings. Fig Frolic and the DMV fig fest I think are both larger. And then various large growers do it from time to time. I went to the staten island figstock and it was pretty empty, not sure if i just got there late or what but there wasnt much fig buying, selling, or eating lol
I’d bet it’s too hard to time a tasting to get enough fig varieties at optimal ripeness. Another advantage of apples, you can store apples very well (and, they usually get a lot better tasting in storage).
Thanks for posting that interesting wheel chart @snarfing. I think one problem is most of the more common varieties are in just a few of the categories. I have mostly dark berry and red berry types. I did have some of the date sugar and honey ones but found them bland. If there really was an honest peach or ripe muskmelon fig I’d be all over that.. my English Brown Turkey I can recall no peach in at all.
yes its definately the case that all the common varieties are sugar figs and a couple into berry. I can send you some cuttings next year of some sodus sicilian hopefully.
On New Year’s Day 2023, I got some Opal apples at a grocery store. It was my first time trying that variety. Three out of the ten I got had a very strong banana candy aftertaste. The texture was perfectly crisp, and the beforetaste was exactly like a Yellow Delicious, one of my favorite apples. I took that first bite of the first one and just sort of stopped, awestruck. Then I passionately saved every single seed from those three fruits with the strong banana candy aftertaste and planted them ALL.
I haven’t yet tried My Jewel, but Steven Edholm keeps mentioning that it tastes a lot like bananas, and I want to taste those apples so badly.
I totally understand why someone would start an apple tree collection, because I have one — I love apples. Roughly half of the fruit trees I’m growing are apples. They grow so very well here, and they’re so delicious.
On top of that, there’s a lot of variability in apple flavors, which is helpful because there are a lot of fruits that don’t do well here. For instance, strawberries and bananas, which are among my favorite fruits and don’t like my arid summers. So the fact that there are apples with strong strawberry aftertastes and apples with strong banana aftertastes feels like a solution to the whole “Why won’t bananas and strawberries grow for me?!” problem.
If fig varieties have as much variability in flavor as apples, that’s extremely promising, because they also seem to do well here. The fact that there are so many figs with a strong strawberry flavor excites me. I don’t care about the ones that taste like stonefruits, because stonefruits do well here — I don’t need a substitute. But a drought tolerant substitute for strawberries and bananas, yes please!
Going to a fig tasting would be so much fun! I’d love to go to any kind of festival with loads of different fruits to taste test. Especially if I could immediately impulse-buy scions or trees of the ones I found most delicious from the very person who grew those fruits I just tasted . . .
Are there growers who do that? I’ve gotta assume somebody does. “Free taste test — now, do you want to buy a tree?” seems like such an obvious business model.
I think that yellow apples are more prone to having a banana flavor, although I’ve also seen reports of it in red and green apples. I’m also probably more prone to noticing a yellow thing tastes like bananas. I assume the production of the ester that tastes like banana (which is itself colorless) tends to occur in yellow-colored fruit more often. Similar to how red apples tend to have berry flavors. And how I’ve seen reports about figs like Olympian and Desert King having peach/melon flavors, but never tasted them personally.
I like figs a lot, but given my location SE PA, the types of Winters we can have, particularly this year, and that I would prefer to plant them in ground, I’m mostly focused on apples/pears too. I do appreciate that deer mostly leave mine alone. Something I can’t say about pome fruit which will be chewed to a stump unless caged.
Oooh, do deer usually leave figs alone? If so, that means putting figs in my front yard, which has no fence around it (unlike my back yard, with a deer fence), would be a good idea.
They have taken a bite here and there (they ate several tips of the new trees I planted this year in November), but otherwise mostly have left them alone. Your deer could of course be different. They’ll eat all the current year’s growth in an unprotected apple tree, every time it starts to recover, by comparison.
Yes, it’s virtually impossible, although one year the person holding the one near the South Carolina/North Carolina border who has like 200 something fig trees did a pretty good job, still not enough.
I find that none of the figs that are supposed to taste like another type of fruit taste that way unless they are very ripe, and it’s dry enough. The only exception to that is melon flavor. I find that virtually any fig variety can taste like melon if there is enough rain and cloudiness. A great example of that is our Maltese fig variety that tastes a lot like strawberry jam. Most figs off that tree does not taste like that even to me, because it’s very rare that it’s dry and sunny long enough here to get that flavor. I am wondering if in your climate if you could ever taste what we taste in our climate, when the rain and cloudiness does not interfere because it’s hot enough, sunny enough and dry enough, at the right stage of fig ripening for some of the figs, some parts of some years.
‘White Baca’ is rumored to have the best peach flavor, yet last I knew still very hard to get.
When it comes to deer it depends on how much other food is available to them, and of course they prefer more tender plants. That is why the prefer thinner younger trees.
I agree on your comments on taste, they are incredibly weather-dependent. I had some periods in this last year where the figs were all stellar (if 100% ripe) and other periods where I was spitting them out, even the ripe ones.
Again getting back to the flavor differences vs apples, you have to have different genes to get different flavors and apples are more genetically diverse. I asked Chatty Geepeetee about it and they agreed. They pointed out that fig varieties today are from a more limited genetic basis and many of the varieties are in fact bud sports of other varieties. I asked for quantitative data and it gave a rough figure of 2x as diverse (diversity meaning how much two random apples vs two random figs differ in their DNA). Figs are still more diverse than peaches, they are one of the more narrow fruits because they are generally self-pollinating. The main reason to grow many different peach varieties is they don’t keep and you want to spread out the harvest.
Re: deer, for almost 20 years they completely ignored my figs but now they often munch on the tips.
Oh I definitely need 100 different apples… eating apples, culinary apples, bittersweet, sharp, sweet, aromatic, hard tannins, soft tannins, early, late, storage… apples that produce well this year, apples that produce well next year. :)…
A lot of people don’t know this. The fig wasp/pollination are not needed for a lot of fig varieties to be amazing, all a lot of varieties need is hot bright sun for 2 or more weeks straight at the right time, with little to no rain.
In my opinion there are very few different fig types, some people break them down based upon flavor way more than they need to be, which helps to identify them, and helps if the figs are perfectly ripe, yet people in most states do not need it broken down that much.
There is what is often called the Adriatic figs, which if properly ripe are like amazing strawberry jam, and there are many different fig varieties that fall under the category.
There are also the Mount Etna/Bordeaux Berry type of figs, the type you are clearly most familiar with which are amazing if they are perfectly ripe
There are also the sugar and honey types of figs similar enough to each other to mention them at the same time. And this kind of fig can actually have a berry or a peach flavor
There are also the figs that are so complex in flavor, that it’s worth separating them from the rest. They are often like more than one of the above combined, or only one of the above, only more complex than most of the other varieties. Like I have a fig that tastes a lot like both strawberry jam, and raspberry when perfectly ripe. The peel when perfectly ripe smells like a very soft ripe banana, the peel virtually melts in the mouth, although the peel tastes herbal, way less interesting than the smell. Some people may even put it in to the sugar fig category, because it’s so sweet, then again a lot of the Adriatic types of figs are just as sweet.
I’m surprised they don’t go after the leaves, considering they’re edible even to humans and supposed to be quite mild tasting.
The deer in my yard eat every single thing, including supposedly deer-resistant flowers. My fig pots have been on an inaccessible deck so far, but I’m planning to move them down to ground level this year and assuming they will need a fully fenced in area.
Roughly half of the fruit trees I’m growing are apples. They grow so very well here, and they’re so delicious.
So the fact that there are apples with strong strawberry aftertastes and apples with strong banana aftertastes feels like a solution to the whole “Why won’t bananas and strawberries grow for me?!” problem. 
